Note: Long and cathartic. Originally, I posted this one over the summer of ‘06. At the time, I still rather hated the very innards of the person whom (to a certain extent) it concerns. Since then, however, events have transpired that have served to extinguish that hatred (well, most of it, anyway...) and to help me begin the process of recovering from the bitterness and pain.
Writing these last few posts has been a very strange experience. In the nearly two decades since many of the events about which I’ve written transpired, I’ve spoken of them only with my very closest friends, and now I find myself – in effect—telling the entire world. When I began this little adventure in cyberspace, I was actually nervous about composing posts on such mundane matters as guns, gear, gardening, and do-it-yourself topics. Now I find that I’m giving vent to things I’ve had bottled up inside for years, and not caring who knows about them.
“What are they gonna do, send you to Vietnam?”
Thanks Marc. And now, another exercise in rambling irrationality!
When last we saw him, our “hero” ((((Snicker!))) was in the Lemans at Lawndale apartment complex in Greensboro, North Carolina, walking away from his ex-girlfriend and returning to his rented car.
I got into the car, threw myself back against the seat, and said: “Drive” to my best friend. We cruised the city aimlessly for a while before parking in a shopping center and wandering the streets for a long time. I chattered and gesticulated like an over-excited monkey the entire time. Like a monkey rattling the bars of its cage and hurling turds of emotion. Like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, pounding plate glass and half-howling, half-crying: “Elaine! Elaine!”
We ended up in some small park or “quad,” and I simply sat on the grass, chain smoking, and watching the sun sink in the west. The west. Tir na-n Og. The land of the forever young. Or was it just where dreams went when they died? Who knew? Who the hell cared anymore? As I sat there, a truly horrible sensation began growing within me. I felt as if I needed to vomit, but there was nothing to throw up.
This was it. It was really over.
Towards sunset, we got back into the car and hit the road. When we made Interstate 85 South, I was in for 300 miles of hell between there and Atlanta, and hell did indeed break loose with a vengeance. I’d been physically unable to vomit back in the city, for all that I felt an overwhelming urge to do so, but in the car, one might say that my soul vomited. I cried as I had never cried before, sometimes in a near-fetal position, with my head against the car window, sometimes, nearly doubled over, and sometimes lying silently back in the reclined seat, completely motionless.
This was every bit as bad as my brother’s suicide a few months before; even worse in some ways. There was a true finality to Chris’s death, and whereas it took me a very long time to learn to live with it, standing by the graveside until the casket had been lowered into the vault gave me a certain sense of closure, however vague. No power on earth could ever bring him back to life, and I knew it.
But this? A human decision, a work rendered in that most malleable of media, the human mind. A decision. A fucking decision. Could it be reversed? Appealed? Circumvented or undercut somehow? With a growing sense of sick horror, I realized that I might never know the answer.
For all that in the main, I was oblivious to anything but my own overwhelming, unrelenting anguish, I remember making sounds. I don’t know what else to call them. They were horrible. Just -- noises, agonized noises that had no business coming from any human throat, let alone that of kid my age. The sounds made by mortally wounded animals For me, though, they wouldn’t terminate in the merciful release of a death-rattle.
After a miserable drive, my best friend and I made metro Atlanta sometime between midnight and 01:00. We parted ways and didn’t see each other for a month. In the morning, I returned the rental car, walked down Peachtree Road, most of the way from Oglethorpe University to Brookhaven Station, caught the train to Lenox Square, and then took the MARTA bus back to Roswell. Lenox Square. We used to come here so often. Never again. Throughout the ordeal in North Carolina I’d been mentally chanting “Don’t mean nothin‘. Don’t mean nothin'," over and over again.
"You haven’t changed a bit."
Don’t mean nothin’.
“You drink too much.”
Don’t mean nothin’.
"There’s so much hate in you.”
Don’t mean nothin‘.
“I’m too sensitive for you.”
Don’t mean nothin’..
“I could never love you again.”
The final “don’t mean nothin’” was drowned out by the roar of an internal whirlpool, which sucked everything within me into itself, leaving me momentarily empty.
Shuffling down Peachtree Road in a semi-daze, I kept repeating it to myself: “Don’t mean nothin’. Don’t mean nothin’.”
In a letter to a friend, I once remarked that “Don’t mean nothin’” is, was, and always has been a lie, since the day the first man muttered it. And it is a man’s lie. The lie we tell ourselves when we have no choice but to function in spite of adversity.
“Don’t mean nothin’ ?” My ass. It meant something alright. It meant everything.
To make matters worse, as MARTA expanded its service and the bus and rail lines changed, we’d often take that very same bus to Lenox, as we no longer had to go to Midtown Station and “backtrack”. When we reached Roswell, the bus was due for a “layover,” so I had to get out at the now-long-gone Amoco station at the corner of US 92 and Crabapple Road. It was a two-and-a-half mile walk home, down the exact route I’d taken the day I met her.
I couldn’t help but remember, with agonizing acuity: I’d walked up to that gas station to buy cigarettes, and gotten caught in a sudden downpour, when she’d asked her mother to pull over and then offered me a ride. Gentle reader, that stretch of road was like the way to my own personal Golgotha. I didn’t even try to bullshit myself with “Don’t mean nothin’.” I just pulled down the brim of my cap and put on my mirrorshades. Let’s leave it at that.
When I made it home, I looked at my watch and realized that it was nearly time for the package store to open. I got into the “turd hearse,” as we called my old, 1975 Nova (which by that time had developed a nasty tendency to leave a trail of parts lying in the road when I drove it) hied me to said outlet, and picked up a sixpack of “tallboys.” No beer today, thankee kindly. Let’s just do malt liquor, shall we? I really wanna get hammered, but I ain’t got enough swag for whiskey. I don’t remember much of the rest of my spring break, as I spent every waking moment thereof blind drunk.
I took one more quarter of classes after that, but it was just a gesture. I hardly ever attended, and wound up with a “D” and an incomplete. I spent a good deal of time getting smashed, and a good deal of time staring into the darkness, which, as the old saying runs, began staring back into me. I had to face the fact that I had nothing left. Had to? The problem was: I couldn’t not face it. The continuum was irreparably broken; my old life was completely and irrevocably gone, and I had no future of which to speak.
I cried bitterly and often, and with every tear, another illusion, another belief rolled away.
Make no mistake, I learned many things during that time, but as often as not, they were lessons I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Time and time again during my youth, I’d heard platitudes to the effect of “Your first love is the one you always remember,” and “True love never dies.” I now knew the first to be a vicious lie. I had been forgotten and replaced with lightning rapidity. As for the second? The world said it without believing it, but I lived it. Because mine didn’t die, I had assumed that it was true in the outside world, as well. I now knew otherwise. I now understood that people who say things of that sort are the least likely to actually believe them. I also understood that an infinitive is a terrible thing to actually split.
Unfortunately, for all that I learned, the answers to certain questions continued to elude me.
When I mentioned that my girl had contradicted herself a time or two during our final conversation, I didn’t specifically mention any of the contradictions. Here’s one now. She’d said: “I never thought you wouldn’t think beyond me,” followed a moment or two later by: “ I was afraid you’d do something like this.” Well, which was it? A man who’d “think beyond her” wouldn’t pull such a stunt. One can’t have it both ways.
For my part, I knew I couldn’t “think beyond her”. For me, love wasn’t some method of advancement or series of conquests. It was a part of who and what I was. I didn’t fall in love with her with the object of “settling” for her for the time being, and then “upgrading” when something else came along in mind. I fell in love with her. I could no more “think beyond her” than I could think of replacing my own brain or any other integral part of me. In loving her to the extent I did, I’d gone and made her a part of me. Moreover, by the time I’d overcome my jealousy, fear and mistrust enough to admit the depth of my own feelings to myself and to attempt a reconciliation, I’d begun to think of myself as a part of something bigger than myself.
I’ve been through breakups since then, and know what they feel like. This didn’t feel like a breakup. It was more like an amputation.
When we were together, it was she and not I who first said the three most lethal words in any human language: “I love you.” Once she had said them, however, she unlocked a floodgate. I, gentle reader, had loved her from the very first moment I saw her. Admittedly, I was far too young to have any business experiencing feelings of such depth and intensity, but in my defense, I’ll say that I didn’t choose to feel that way. It was spontaneous. When I said: “I love you” to her for the first time, I had never – and have never – meant anything more in my life.
I meant them so much that I hadn’t even wanted to say them, but when I did, it was a confession of sorts. It was a moment of pure, unvarnished truth. I may only have said those three simple words, but what I meant was: “I don’t mean I love you as long as we agree with each other. I don’t mean I’ll love you until someone ‘better’ comes along. I don’t mean I’ll love you until I get my rocks off. I love you, and for better or for worse, as long as heaven and earth endure, I always will.” To me, that simple pronouncement had the solemnity of a wedding vow.
“Think beyond her”?
I couldn’t.
In retrospect, I believe that her contradictory statement was her way of avoiding the fact that she’d been wrong. In the “Dear John” letter she’d written me, she’d accused me of not really loving her, of only wanting “something to show off and call [my] own.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, as my recent commission of several misdemeanors and an outright felony or two, combined with the act of driving 300 miles each way in a single day for an objective whose odds of success were less than one percent should have served to illustrate to even the most obtuse. As we were both TAG (Talented and Gifted; a “Well-ain’t-we-just-ever-so-fucking-special?” program for kids with high IQ’s and less common sense than God gave geese) students, she was anything but obtuse.
At the time, I believed that they illustrated just that, and that being factually incorrect somehow compromised her self-image. Her letter had been an act of what psychologists call “projection”, and her words a few years later were an act of denial. If she’d been wrong about me, about what else might she have been wrong?
Over the years, I had time to put a few puzzle pieces together into a coherent whole. The whole as often as not presents a picture I probably wouldn’t have wanted to see in the past, but I don’t suppose a little truth or clarity ever killed anyone. It just makes one wish it did, at times…
If the gentle reader has read the “Occasionally Sleazy Highlights…“ post, he’s probably “grokked” that except for certain aspects of the actual detective work, what I’d done was to sally forth on a personal crusade, a silly, romantic and thoroughly “Cavalier” undertaking. My tidewater ancestors almost certainly would have been proud. My upland ancestors, on the other hand, probably would have disapproved, and counseled outright abduction, but that’s another story entirely…
I’d been “…lov[ing] pure and chaste from afar” as I worked to “clean up my act” enough to try and set things right. Pure antiquated Suth’n chivalry. In the best medieval fashion, I’d put my lady fair upon a pedestal, and now strained to be worthy of her. As much as it hurt to admit it, I later determined that she might not have deserved the adulation. Unfortunately, given my almost stereotypically Celtic temperament, I’m capable of harboring unusually deep feelings. Sometimes I can harbor diametrically opposed and equally intense sentiments towards the same object simultaneously. I’ll leave you, the gentle reader to figure out what a barrel of laughs that is…
Finally, on 16 March 1989, I launched my “redneck opera”; Wagner meets The Dukes of Hazzard, and the rest is history.
I’m saying this as an honest observation, and not out of nastiness, but when I took a retrospective view, I couldn’t believe a “drama queen” like her didn’t just eat it up. I’d also come to the retrospective realization that the undertaking probably wasn’t worth it, for all that if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t change anything but the timetable and a few details of the approach.
This is difficult to explain, but it was actually something I had to do simply because of my own personality type. It was a last-ditch, do-or-die effort, during which I endured pain I never even knew I could feel, made sacrifices I really couldn’t afford at that time, and took considerable risks for the infinitesimal chance of success I had. Later in life, I realized that part of me had always been there, for all that I kept it locked up for the most part. It was the same part of me that helped accident victims from their vehicles: the part of me that went to funeral after funeral for the sake of my friends (even though said ceremonies always bring back unpleasant memories); the part of me inspires complete strangers to sit down and tearfully tell me their life-stories to this day.
I doubt she ever saw that aspect of my personality before, as I’d probably never let her see it. Sadly, though, I don’t think she ever looked for it, let alone encouraged it.
I came away from the adventure a wreck, and spent a considerable period of time in my own personal hell. My self-esteem was completely shot, but somehow, when I’d crawled out from beneath most of the wreckage, I had something new: the beginnings of a sense of self-worth.
Certainly, I’ve been punishing myself for my failure for a long time, but when I distance myself from myself, I have to admit that not a whole hell of a lot of other guys would have had the resourcefulness, the drive, or even the balls to have pulled something like that off. Although ultimately, I lost, I knew deep inside that I had done everything within my power to show her that I truly loved her. Why didn’t I let the matter rest? I couldn’t. Just as I’m constantly going back and revising and reworking the posts on this blog, I had no choice but to keep going back to the events of that day and try to figure out if my performance could have been improved in any way. Had I actually done everything in my power? Had I overlooked anything?
I wondered for months. The months turned to years, and the years to decades. Finally, on the evening of Thursday, November 30th, I received the closure I needed. I had done everything I possibly could have, and there was truly no hope of ever winning her heart again. Nothing I could ever say or do would change that. The situation was completely out of my hands. I could no more act upon it in any significant way than I could move a mountain with my bare hands. With that, I was able to absolve myself of all guilt and all sense of responsibility, sheathe my dulled and chipped broadsword and shed my bloody, rusty, black iron mail. My mother’s father’s people are the “knights in shining armor,” gentle reader. In “matters of the heart,” I am very much my father’s son.
“Touch not the cat bot a glove.”
Finally, after seventeen long years, the casket was lowered into the vault, beside that of my brother. I mourned it as any decent man would mourn the dead, but I finally accepted the fact that it was dead.
Let’s part ways with death and get back to denial, shall we?
I’ve said that in addition to the denial, there was an aspect of projection, have I not? I was watching television some time ago (rare enough, for me), when an old movie came on AMC or some other such station. It was an ‘80s John Hughes (((shudder))) offering entitled The Breakfast Club. The very movie we’d seen on our first real “date” – i.e., the first time we actually went out and did something instead running around downtown Atlanta or sitting around “exploring,” if you will.
She’d already seen it with her best friend, so I wondered why she insisted that I see it. For my part, I was about as anxious to do so as I was to contract a dose of the clap. She pointed out that one of the characters (“Bender”) was a lot like me. Fair enough. As I was watching it years later, though, I noted an exchange between “Bender” and the character portrayed by Molly Ringwald. During this exchange, “Bender” says something to the effect of" “Wouldn’t I just be the perfect thing to piss your parents off?”
All these years later, I think that was the part I was supposed to see. Pow! Now it all made sense. For all that we were both in the program for “gifted” kids before I quit that particular sick joke, I was still the neighborhood weirdo, “edgy” and unacceptable. In many ways, I still didn’t want to believe this for a very long time, but it eventually occurred to me that I was nothing but a fashion accessory of sorts. This way, she could be the “nice” girl who was on the debate team and in the Spanish Club and the International Club and all that crap, but have an “outsider” boyfriend, and one of whom her parents disapproved, as well.
This way, she could get some attention (not that she needed it – people paid her all sorts of attention, but she was, like many teenagers, too caught up in self-pity to see it) and get a bit of passive/aggressive revenge on the folks, as well. Not that I fault her for that. To this very day, I think they had it coming. One does, after all, sow what he reaps.
For the edification of the gentle reader: I was a mess in those days. I was guarded, hostile, wary, and in a 24-7 state of “red alert.” I was jealous, possessive, controlling, and frankly, hated damn near everything. I don’t mean "disliked", I mean hated. So gentle reader, I’m not making myself out to be some poor, suffering soul, martyred on the altar of love. I was a consummate bastard, and that’s that.
A budding monster, in love with a drama queen. Ain’t we got fun?
For a very long time, this aspect of the situation angered me. I was convinced that should one ask her today, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him any more about me than I did two paragraphs ago, without resorting to exhaustive research of the kind I once undertook with such gusto. That was assuming that she remembered me at all, and for years, I wasn‘t even sure of that.
I, on the other hand, could (and still can) tell the gentle reader everything from her birthdate to her hair and eye color, to the subject of a morbid little ditty she and a friend had composed in fourth grade, the names of three of her dogs and two of her cats… The list goes on and on. Wouldn’t have to check a single reference, either. I have it all in my head. And yet I was the one who “wasn’t listening.” Odd. It seemed to me that I was listening very closely. More projection on her part. I still wish I’d spotted it earlier, in a way. I was listening to everything she said, tucking it away and sorting over it, but I was never able to understand fully what was important and what was irrelevant. As we both spoke in hints and riddles most of the time, there was a vast and unbridgeable communication gap between us. For years, I blamed her for that, but the fault -- in truth -- was mine as much as it was hers.
Then there’s the fact that apparently, I was the sole cause of all our problems. I recently found a packet of notes and letters in the basement while I was getting rid of some old papers, so I took the time to read them. As was the case with our conversations, every single problem in our relationship was attributed to me. In her own mind, she was completely blameless. It wasn’t possible that she might have provoked me a time or two, or that certain of her behaviors were irritating to the point of inducing homicidal rages, it seems.
If the gentle reader gathers that I manipulated her on occasion (I mean psychologically, ya sweaty, raincoat-wearin’, panty-sniffer! Get yer mind outta the gutter!), he’d be quite correct. I did so consciously, overtly and quite cruelly at times. But she did the same, only on the passive-aggressive level. At the time, I was too egotistical even to admit that I could be manipulated – which left me wide open for it, by the way – and too young and inexperienced to recognize what now seems as plain as the nose on my face.
Allow me, gentle reader, to “lay one on you.” Dig this, hipsters. Hopefully, you can “groove” to it: After that fateful meeting on Crabapple road in the spring of 1984, I didn’t see her for some time. I spent most of the summer alone, reading, playing my guitar, and sometimes hanging out with my brother. On the first day of my senior year, however, I noticed her waiting at my bus stop. We chatted a bit, and the next day, she was back, for all that her own stop was a good distance away.
Well pardon my dumb, male ass for interpreting this as a sign of serious interest. My brother confirmed this one day as we were walking back to our house. “Hey numbnuts, that chick’s into you. I think she wants to ‘grind up yer jones’ (a crude reference to a Frank Zappa tune). Too bad you’re a Go-rilla with no Bo-nana!” When I caught him and finished kicking his ass, I admitted to myself that he was probably right, for all that I couldn‘t understand why this was the case. Yes, one might say that I was somewhat lacking in self-esteem.
Ergo, I was puzzled. Why would a chick like that have any interest in me? Sure, I’d been thinking about her since the day we met, but this was odd, to say the least.
Then one evening, I was sitting in my room (no glass and spoon, mind you, and no small birds or ivy bunches), when:
“Suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my—”,
Well, at my bedroom window, at any rate.
Quoth the Bean: “What the hell…?”
I dimmed the lights, drew the curtain, and looked outside. She was on the lawn, chucking pebbles at the shutter. Hopefully, I may be again pardoned for having interpreted this as a gesture of interest. I went downstairs and outside, and we went for a walk and chatted some more.
A few days later, I received an irate phone call from the lassie. It seems that one of my brother’s friends had been telling people she was my girlfriend. This really seemed to piss her off for some reason. She accused me of having gotten that particular ball rolling, and told me that her boyfriend would be extremely displeased if he got wind of it. As I had done no such thing, I informed her of exactly that, bade her good day, and coldly thanked her never to call me – or call on me – again.
I then had a small nervous breakdown. How would the great poets of old have said this? Ah, yes! I was "all tore up". That's the term I was looking for! Boyfriend? If she had a boyfriend, what the hell was she doing spending all this time with me? Where was he, for the love of God? I was more of a mess than I care to relate, and my brother was quick to spot it.
“Boyfriend? Don’t worry. If you want, we can find out who he is and pay him a visit. I haven’t kicked anyone’s ass but yours since we left Germany, and I kinda miss it! Man, what a cunt! I can’t believe she’d pull that kind of shit on you, dude! I coulda swore she had a thing for you, too! As for Jimbo: I’ll set his ass straight. Just for God’s sake don’t do anything crazy. Go play your guitar or something.”
Things worked out, and we ended up together a few days later. My brother told me, though, that in his opinion, she didn’t have a boyfriend in the first place, and that to his mind, she’d just been “yanking my chain” to see how I’d react. I think he may have been right. Now that’s what I’d call manipulation. But she never would have seen it that way.
This brings us neatly back to the matter of trauma/drama. I used to sit there for hours on end, feeling absolutely helpless as she went over every one of her insecurities and “pains,” in awful detail. Hearing some of it hurt me, for all that I never complained. I’d try to tell her how wrong she was about herself, but to no avail. As for my feelings? Never taken into consideration. My God! If that’s what you think of yourself, what must you think of me? What am I then, just something you “settled for”? The best you can do for now? All these years down the road, it appears that I was exactly that, but too in love to see it.
The gentle reader has heard the saying “Love is blind,” no? Well in my case, it’s also deaf and mentally retarded.
All I could think of was to try and tell her that other people out there had it much worse. Whenever I’d do this, she’d accuse me of trying to “top” her. That always confused the hell out of me. All I was trying to do was get her to put things into perspective, as the degree of suffering she seemed to experience over these matters was painful to me, as well. You must remember, gentle reader, even slightly unbalanced assholes can love and care about other people. We just have a twisted way of showing it sometimes.
I couldn’t understand the degree of trauma she suffered over such little things, either. For example, she was an extremely beautiful girl -- the most beautiful I'd ever seen in my life, and by far the prettiest girl in our entire high school -- as any guy could have told you. I don’t think she ever noticed the way they looked at her, but I sure as hell did… All the same, she’d bitch about being “fat” or “ugly” or what-have-you, when she was neither. Now I won’t mention names, as it would be cruel, but we did indeed go to school with some “aesthetically challenged” girls. Girls at whom most guys wouldn’t look twice – if even once. How she could compare her own circumstances to theirs was beyond me.
She was also extraordinarily intelligent, which made her all the more interesting, as I've never been able to abide "bimbos." There was no shortage of such vacuous little hoochies at good ol' RHS, either. If anyone should have felt badly, it was that bunch. Some of them truly were "dumb as a box of rocks," and I always found talking to them roughly as enjoyable as coming down with a severe urinary tract infection.
I still wonder at times if the off-kilter but still highly functioning "Bean Brain" wasn't part of the problem.
Some people can't handle not being the smartest one in the room anymore, so perhaps dating an intellectual equal was a disconcerting experience. Were thatr the case, though, I don't imagine she'd have pursued a guy who was in the "gifted" program in the first place. Just another unanswered question.
One thing that seemed to bother her was the fact that she wasn't "popular"? Well, who the hell was? Realistically, the social environment in an American high school is a “bell curve” of sorts. At one end, you’ll find a small group of students who comprise the “in crowd.” At the other end, you’ll find the rebels, outcasts, “freaks,” stoners, punk rockers (in those days), etc., said group being equally small.
Everyone else fits somewhere in between.
To complicate the picture a bit, that huge middle section can be subdivided and any given member of any given subgroup – while not a likely candidate for class president – might very well be quite popular within said subgroup. To further complicate matters, you’ll find people who are so outgoing that they move among all the subgroups on that curve with ease, and then there are the guys like me – the real “loners,” “solos” or “solitaires” who don’t really care about status, period. If it accrues to us as a consequence of something we’ve done, great! Nifty! And I’m not being sarcastic, OK? Man is a social animal, it’s natural to desire companionship, and it’s nice to be appreciated. Like any other guy, I had my buddies at the time, and I truly enjoyed their company. But if, on the other hand, people do disapprove of us? What can I say, other than: “Blue Moon of Kentucky Keep on Shinin’”?
OK, so she wasn’t popular. But again, who was? This is why I was at a loss to understand the apparent agony she suffered over such things. Let’s take a look at that curve again, shall we? Granted, she fit somewhere into the middle. That description fit most of the student body, though, for the love of God! Things could have been worse. She wasn’t at the “loser” end, nor did she share space with the kids who weren’t even on the curve – the “Special Ed” kids, the kids with deformities, etc. Hell, if she’d wanted to feel sorry for someone, any of them would have been a better candidate than herself. Looking at that paragraph, though, I now realize that I was too self-absorbed to try and discover just why these things troubled her so. At the time, I opted to write her off as weak, and simply added that particular "wart" to the "warts and all" file.
I don't think it's any deep, dark secret that I was just a little bit "out there," so much so that in many ways I was the ultimate outsider. I think this was part of the problem, too. I had little use for polite society, and that wasn't just a pose. I meant it. Even at the tender age of seventeen, I perceived certain aspects of modern, American life as vapid and banal. Little wonder then that I tended to "live in history books".
Ronald Reagan was the only halfway decent president we've had in my lifetime, but even he was no George Washington or Andrew Jackson. And he was certainly no Robert the Bruce. The figures of the past -- even figures such as Ivan the Terrible, Hitler, Genghis Khan and Vlad Tepes -- seemed so much more vital than the staid, insipid, boring creatures with whom I was forced to "rub elbows" on a daily basis that I couldn't help but be attracted to them.
She, on the other hand, seemed to be quite the opposite. In a note she wrote me, she once remarked upon some of the sillier, more conventional girls in one of her classes and said: "I think I'm becoming one of them." I think the truth is she wanted to become one of them. Tragic, really. Such a sad waste of a brilliant mind.
I never did want to become one of them.
I wanted to annihilate them.
During the course of our relationship, she also said such things as : "I'll find my niche in life before I graduate."
"Niche"? What niche? I never gave a rat's ass about fitting into some arbitrarily devised social
construct, and resented the hell out of the fact that anyone would dare to assign anyone else a "niche."
My Bean ancestors didn't seek "niches." They tore gaping holes in their enemies' worlds, instead. They didn't agonize over finding a place in the "scheme." They rode across the border, killed the hated English, stole their livestock and had their way with their daughters. If a Bean wanted to find a "niche," he damned-well carved one for himself. In the New World (after stomping a mudhole in some Tory rear-ends and walkin' them suckers dry at King's Mountain), they made their way into East Tennessee and did much the same, moonshining, powder-making and gunsmithing all the while.
My several-times-great-grandfather, Marmaduke Vickery, was much the same. He didn't seek a "niche", but rather took up his musket and (for all that he was on the losing side at the Battle of the Alamance), voiced his grievances with powder and shot during the 1771 "Regulator Rebellion." Countless Talbotts, Meroneys and others -- "In your veins the blood still flows/Of brave men who once arose/Burst the shackles of their foes/Honest men and free," as the song goes -- did likewise, and I am very much their child in many respects.
So what was all this prattle of pain and alienation? Who gave a rat's ass? Surely not I...
Nowadays, I think I understand it, as I‘ve seen it so many times. To her, pain was some kind of merit badge. To me, it was just pain. Moreover, it was ubiquitous. One could escape it briefly, but it always came back, so there was no more merit in feeling it than there was in the simple existence of matter and energy. Pain simply was. End of story. And nobody lived happily ever after, as life just doesn’t work that way – it has “ups” and “downs.”
In writing posts of this sort, I’m trying to make sense of -- and ultimately free myself from -- the “downs,” so I can focus more on the “ups.” Thanks for bearing with me, gentle reader.
"Black the light that will shine until it is destroyed by the blade."
The blade missed its mark, though.
Were I not in an introspective frame of mind, I'd respond:
"Run, run, ye' ganglin' crew
This mornin's work ye' lang wi' rue
The bonny blue bonnets are after you,
Tae' wish ye's a' guid mornin'. "
Love,
Dave