My Generation: A Brief Intro

Important warning for anyone considering reading further:  this bit is very stylistically self-indulgent.  It’s neither linear nor written for clarity.  While not exactly pure stream-of-consciousness, it’s pretty damned close.  My advice to you is to not read it at all.  Despite being pretty short, especially by my standards, it’s likely to aggravate you with all the aggravation of a much longer text.

            Just so it’s clear, I’m not joking or being self-effacing.  Proceed at your own risk.

As far as impetus goes, I was sitting at my computer at Tate Street and thinking that this current and rising generation of young adults might prove to be the best of us, in the end.  For many reasons, both small and great, they will do great things.  I’m sure of it.  My generation has, or had, many of the same ideals, but we lacked the courage that those replacing us will soon find.  This new generation, these scions of the internet and children of scorn (swimming Spoon River and looking forlorn) give me a strange sensation of faith.  In what, I’m not certain, but I like to think that it’s in that better world my generation never quite believed in.

~***~

These are the games we play, the idle whiling away of foolish hours, the half-closed eyes amidst the shared impulsive laughs, the zephyr drifting through as customers arrive or depart, opening the doors to lingering drafts, familiar faces mixed with those of strangers, with a cheerful smile or a soulsick heart bearing paper flowers.  Sometimes one will wave at us, or mumble a friendly hellogoodbye; to balance the social spectres, we return the greetings with a friendly murmured sigh.  The exchanges slip past like whispers, immaculate in their brevity, barely noticed and soon forgotten during the hidden dangers and zwischenzugs, the paucity of scale in the en passants and sacrificial aftermaths, the whole board contrived in a million forking paths that shift and advance, or break and fail. 

And once again the idle foolish hours, the illusion of meaning hiding the truth of levity.

This is what we believed in:  not a damned thing that mattered.  The Sixties slouched toward Bethlehem.  We were just waiting fruitlessly to be born into it.

I’m not sure what we thought would happen if our hour actually did come round at last.  In a drab age in a drab land filled with all the drabbery we could handle, we re-enacted the largest flea circus the world had ever known.  Winding springs and clinkclank levers, absolved of any call to action, rejecting all the nows-or-nevers, we took the world sloppyslow.  Steady as grass and equally effective.  Grungy flannel kept us dry, but only just.  When it came down to us against the world, as it always does for each new generation, the world rolled its eyes, and rightly so.

            In a musty murky warmth of all the fogdream seasons, the retreat to the buzzdrone of air-conditioned iterations of rooms, chewing dry bread and mustard greens, convinced the clock could be forgotten, leading neither to our salvations nor to our dooms.  A generation of indigobirds nesting in the truths that other generations – and only other generations – had devised.   Nothing ever meant anything if we could help it.  We were too cool for that, obsessed with making certain that no-one had cause to think we gave a damn.   Without expectations, we could not be surprised.

We found a true courage in our lack of convictions.

            Peccatum nostrum.  Our unoriginal sin.

Standing astride our interdictions of a changing changeless world atop slippery rocks and ingots covered in verdigris.  We had nothing to do and nowhere to be.  We grew conservative, not out of spite, but out of disbelief in a better world, and with this came a withheld grief under the battered redlight.  

            We were not the future that we should have been.

~To be continued when I feel the urge to do so, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the year 2035~

~Regarding *Casey Dee

~On the Nature of Love and Affection.  And, Let’s Be Honest, a Fair Amount of Lust As Well Because Love and Affection Are All Well And Good, But Sometimes the Evening Needs To Go In A Different Direction~

[Quick note:  *Casey is actually the person who wanted me to put up my natterings for her perusal.  Since apparently others have stumbled on this little niche blog, I figure this is a pertinent piece of information.  Now, if I ever actually give her the link to this damned thing -- it's been  year and counting -- I’ll probably delete this intro before doing so because it would just be odd for her to read this. In any event, as always, the asterisk indicates it's not her real name.]

[Quick note 2:  This is likely to undergo significant revision at some point. I’m not sure I’ve gone nearly as in-depth as I should have]

[Quick note 3:  As always, there’s no great lesson here.  Indeed, there’s even less of a great lesson than usual.  I’m just thinking about *Casey because I was busy texting her today  and, well, I figured it was time to write a bit about how we got together instead of working on what I was supposed to be working on.  I've been working on a couple things about her in my spare time, but this one was the easiest to just finish up]

Love, the truest and most fatuous love alike, will always find time to be a strange and fickle beast, just to keep you on your toes.

        Sometimes you find love through diligence and the occasional expensive lobster dinner.  Sometimes love finds you, usually through blind stupid luck. 

And sometimes someone just tells you that you’ve been in love for a while and you, being the clueless idiot that you are, never noticed.  So you nod thoughtfully and decide that it’s nice not to have to worry about the hard work of figuring that sort of thing out for yourself.

        No, really.  That actually happens.  It’s a glorious moment for those of us too lazy to think for ourselves.

It was nearabout the end of October, approaching that spooky time of year when candy manufacturers worship odd marshmallow gods at chocolate fountains while otherwise stolid adults irrationally decide that the time has come to wear inappropriate clothing that emphasizes all the body parts they spend the rest of the year keeping on the down-low.  A magical and giggly time, pregnant with all manner of nascent naughtiness and picaresque peregrinations.  That time of year when leaves are changing colors, the drunks are falling, and the Christmas ads are poking their head out looking for a shadow that means 8 more weeks of wall-to-wall toy commercials.

        Spoiler:  they always see a shadow.  Always. 

        So it was almost Halloween, or maybe it actually was Halloween night itself.  I can’t recall exactly, and it doesn’t matter.  It was a Halloween party being held during the appropriate season in the appropriate sort of place, and *Casey and I were there, though not dressed appropriately.  That is to say, we were dressed appropriately for normal times and places.  I’m pretty sure I was actually wearing a turtleneck, because the creepy malingerings of Grad School Disease¹ can sneak up on even the most anti-establishment of us.  But this was a gay Halloween party, and appropriateness takes on many and occasionally disturbing forms at gay parties. And some of these defy any attempts to slap the label of ‘appropriate’ on them no matter how laissez-faire and loosey-goosey you get with the language.

I've always been quite fond of my gay friends – they have been, without exception, awesome people – but there's really no way to ignore the fact that when they have reason or opportunity to dress up in costume, they don't generally do it by half-measures.  When it comes to sillyfuntime, I'm not even sure they possess a ruler capable of marking out anything less than 3.14 measures.  Sometimes you get the sense they’re trying to live up to expectations, even amongst themselves.  Even so, they manage to genuinely enjoy the process of doing so, in the end. 

When you leave your stupid preconceptions and ideologies at the door and just accept people for who they are, it's really quite a nice experience.  How many racists, misogynists, and homophobes have missed out on genuinely happy moments because they reject people out of hand?

        The problem with generalizations that you like is that reality sometimes muddles things up. 

In this case, for instance, a majority of those in attendance were actually dressed more or less in street clothes.  This was the post-grunge world, so take the descriptives ‘more or less’ and ‘street clothes’ how you will.  Mixed in, however, were a few Gay Halloween celebrants – army butch, fishnet drag, obscure (and occasionally obscene) fuzzy-wuzzies, and one sizable purple prosthetic penis on a pear tree.  Well, no, it was just a gaudily dressed man who seemed to be celebrating a half-dozen Halloweens and their attendant costumes simultaneously.  But the costume quite festive enough to rate its own carol.  Festive enough that though I only saw him once, heading for the backyard, I remember him perfectly when all the other attendees have faded into the recesses of my memory.

        The costume was, in a gay word, fantabulous.

        (Spell-check, incidentally, has no problem with that last word.  I can’t, and would never try to, explain why this pleases me no end.)

         For the most part, though, the party itself was basically just a normal house party with some Halloween trappings.  *Kathy and *Ginny, who neither dated nor coordinated outfits, to the best of my knowledge, were dressed as standard military-surplus butches, olive t-shirts and camo pants and black boots.  To my untrained straight-guy eye, this get-up looked no different from their normal mode of lesbian attire.  So I honestly had no idea if they were in costume or not.  *Silas was…I have no idea what *Silas was.  He most likely didn’t know himself.   He lived a far more disassociated life than most.  He seemed content, though, and I was as happy for him as I could be given that I never really did understand him past the basics of spontaneous hugging and an endless supply of blueish-purple pills he popped like plum-flavored Tic Tacs while refusing to identify them for the rest of us poor sinners.  At times, I suspected he himself had no clear idea what they were, choosing to just enjoy the mystery.  And the high.  Definitely the mystery and the high.  They made him about as happy as someone who had no idea what was going on could be.  Not that I’m knocking it.  Knowing what’s going on around you can be a depressing bit of business at times.

        So there we were, *Casey and I.  I’d brought her here just as a friend, albeit a friend I’d already gotten as far as 42% of the way to first base with.  Maybe closer to 34%, taking into account the metric conversion rate, the current price of silver, and the ambient temperature of North Carolina in the autumn.  Somewhere in that general range.  At the time, she was still very much my tutee.  A more impertinent tutee than most, to be sure, who had little patience for what she considered pointless rules governing the behavior of two legal consenting adults.  Yet still someone whose connection to me was subject to the extensive rules in the University Code of Conduct regarding proper relationships between T.A.s and undergrads.
        Somehow, though, I couldn't bring myself to agonize too terribly much over this minor detail.  Funny what a pretty girl could do to a fine, upstanding, practically saintly beacon of humanity like me.

As noted, we weren’t properly dressed for the occasion.  Or, judging from a couple of the costumes, properly undressed.  The hosts graciously let our lack of participation slide because, well, it wasn’t the sort of gathering where people actually cared that much about such things.  Guessing conservatively, a third of them were likely on drugs, and that’s a Mississippi politics-level conservative estimate.  Another third was buzzed from the booze and possibly doing unspeakable things with antipsychotics borrowed from their roommates.  The last third must have left early, because pretty much everyone at the party appeared to be high or buzzed.

(In retrospect, I suppose it would be less confusing to just refer to the high/buzzed groups as two halves.  But I didn’t and I stand by my choice.)  

We mingled, we chattered, we moseyed about.  All the usual sorts of things one does at college parties.  Noticing a young lady give *Casey an appraising look, I fought the temptation to work out something beneficial to all three of us. 

My self-restraint has never been legendary, but it eventually managed deeds too heroic and inspiring to capture in song or myth that night, because I somehow managed to refrain from suggesting anything overly inappropriate.  Our history of reaching 34-42% of the way to first base didn’t seem sufficient to be proposing such endeavors. 

Besides, I was enjoying her company.  Why would I wish to share her with some woman we met at a party?

Don’t answer that.  I’m just going to pretend I didn’t even ask that. 

So we chattered some more, we wandered through the kitchen, out back the house, back inside where the lovely assortment of alcohol resided, and finally ended up in somebody’s bedroom with a couple other somebodies, doing exactly what one would expect to do in a bedroom at a boozed-up party.

That is, lying down on the sizable, if somewhat careworn and possibly bodily fluid-infused, bed looking at but not actually watching the TV while sharing muted conversation.

To clarify:  well, yes, there are other things people do in bedrooms.  I’ve known about that sort of thing for years, now, thanks for asking.  But, generally-speaking, people don’t do these things with complete strangers or idle acquaintances in the room.

To clarify the previous clarification:  more accurately, generally I don’t do them with complete strangers or idle acquaintances in the room.  I can't speak for other people in this regard.

To clarify the clarification of the initial clarification:  there have been a few exceptions in my life where I can, in fact, speak for certain other people who have been perfectly happy doing these things with complete strangers and idle acquaintances in the room.  That’s neither here nor there, though.

One last clarification:  one of my favorite memories from my undergrad years was visiting someone who, in true sitcom style, allowed his friends to just walk into his apartment without knocking.  Since I was counted as a good friend, I did precisely that one June afternoon, only to discover he wasn't in his usual spot on the couch, drunk and grinning like an idiot.  So, after looking about and not finding him anywhere, I knocked on his bedroom door.  No response, so I figured he was asleep.  I was there to pick him up because we were due somewhere shortly.  So I opened the door to go in and wake him up.  As discerning readers have probably already guessed, if for no other reason than I'm telling this anecdote in the wake of my above comments, he was in the throes of sex with his girlfriend, her on top, him lying there grinning like an idiot, though perhaps a little less drunk than usual.  Not actually sober, as such, but we can't expect miracles from men like him.  As I opened the door, filling the room with light from the afternoon sun through the patio doors, they stopped momentarily to look in my direction.  Before I could back out muttering apologies, the girlfriend waved and said ‘Hi, Random!’  My friend then added, “Be with you in about fifteen minutes.”  Without so much as missing the slightest beat, the girlfriend, still looking at me, rolled her eyes and said, “More like five.” 

To this day, I’m unsure whether she winked, but the look of unanticipated embarrassment on his face has been a source of many happy memories to comfort me in dark times during the intervening years.  I cracked up, further intensifying his embarrassment, and left with a polite wave.  If all bedroom activities involved someone like this girl, I’d spend a lot more time bursting into random bedrooms unannounced.²

I wish I could be certain of her name, though, just for posterity

But I digress.  Meanwhile, a couple years later, back at a Halloween party in North Carolina....

After all this time, I can’t actually recall whether I had been drinking.  If I had, it wasn’t very much.  A beer or two at most, because I would never have allowed myself to get drunk, or even buzzed, if I was driving *Casey home again, especially since the drive back took 40 minutes, give or take, even at that hour of the night. 

Besides, I’ve never actually driven drunk.  This isn’t some sententious public service announcement, just an observation that I decided long ago that no matter where I needed to go or when I needed to be there, drinking would never be the best way to get there speedily, accurately, or alive…ly.

I drowsed a bit, though, a murmuring lingering endless endless slipping through surreal evenings of smoke and alt-rock sort of drowsiness where parts of the evening seem like bits of dream in retrospect.  There was a rhythm about the smoky evening, a lingering beat as the world outside this place, this time, became background noise as I lay next to *Casey, whose presence and voice I was acutely, if somewhat drowsily, aware of.  One cannot fall asleep when adorable parts of the waking world demand your attention.  

I no longer recall exactly what brought the discussion about.  It doesn’t matter.  The process is almost always a lot less important than we think.  Determinism is just a word.  Whatever ad hoc universal machinery set these things in motion, it became trivial long ago.  All I’m talking about here is the culmination. 

We were lying on the bed with another couple, talking amongst ourselves while assiduously not watching the TV.  The other couple eventually moved away (out of the room?  I can’t recall for certain) and *Casey and I took absolutely no advantage of the newly available space to scoot apart as we kept talking about this and that and possibly the other.  Somehow, the conversation veered off and, in response to something I no longer recall – and, as I said, isn’t important anyway – *Casey explained to me that I was in love with her.

Let me be clear here before I continue.  *Casey was (and is, even if she seems a bit uncertain on that point nowadays) lovely as leaves limned a summer sunset, smart as a snap-brim fedora, and as fun to hang out with as…as….well, I’m drawing a blank.  As fun to hang out with as a lovely, smart woman?  A rich Irishman on a capricious bender?  Either one works.  Regardless of my stunted capacity for comparisons, never let it be said I don’t have excellent taste in women. 

Every single one of my girlfriends has agreed on this point.  Every.  Single.  One.  While some people of tawdrily suspicionating nature might argue their assessments of my taste in women were biased, I think it’s presumptuous, and not a little rude, to accuse them of such unsavory motivations.  

But, then, I’m a true gentleman.

Even so, it honestly never occurred to me, at least not consciously, that I was in love with her.  I was never the sort to just jump straight into that particular emotional cauldron.  Patience, while not always one of my virtues, was certainly one of my vices when it came to committing to such things back in the day.

I like to think I can do much better with commitment now.  But I also like to think the world is secretly run by naked mole rats with a lot of love to give, so who knows?

At the time, *Casey and I had known each other approximately two months.  Given that I hadn’t fallen in love with girls I actually dated a lot longer than that, it seemed reasonable that I hadn’t pondered my feelings on the matter too deeply.  Pondering my feelings inevitably leads to imbibing excessive amounts of caffeine, after all, and given that I already imbibe excessive amounts of caffeine, I reasonably avoid finding reasons to add even more caffeine to my daily routine unless absolutely necessary. 

She was assigned to me at the start of the semester, and it was her freshman year.  So we had from late August to late October to get to know each other.  Mind you, I’m not completely immune to being smitten.  I’ve known the sting of unexpected and pleasant smiting (not in the kinky British sense, get your mind out of the filthy Thames) on rare occasion.  Still, in all honesty, I’m generally not the sort to go head-over-heels at first sight.  Or second.  Or third.  Once I thought I was head-over-heels at fourth sight, but it turned out I’d merely tripped on a curb.

        My first thought was, and I remember this perfectly:

Oh.  Huh.

A beat.

Didn’t see that coming

I blinked, slowly.  Then: 

Really? 

Another beat.  Another blink.

I should say something.  I wonder what.

A hint of mammalian diving reflex deep inside, just to keep me grounded and cogent.

Okay, you know what?  That makes a lot of sense.

        In addition to never letting it be said that I don’t have excellent taste in women, never let it be said that I’m not tres par excellence in all matters of bemused self-realization.  Especially when said self-realization require someone else prodding me into the realization after my own brain fails to make a basic logical leap.

The fact that she was pretty as hell and I had already caught my brain and other organs sneaking in certain untoward thoughts in certain untoward directions didn’t hurt at all.  I do not deny this.  If it makes me shallow, I’m pretty sure I can live with that.  Still, I’ve had enough dating experience in my life that I’m perfectly capable of telling the difference between love and lust.

        Usually.

        So, with lust and love in their proper places, my next thought:

        Hmmm.  I like that idea.

        Glancing at her face, which somehow managed to be beautiful, insouciant, and kind of annoyingly smug all at the same time, I finished with:

       Yep.  She might have a point.

       While I was thinking these things, I examined at *Casey with a newly piqued (and apparently loving) interest. 

The fact that she was informing me what I was thinking and feeling didn’t even get me het up. 

Normally it would have, because I am quite clear about deciding such things as ‘my thoughts’ and ‘my feelings’ for myself and tend to get ornery when someone tries to do it for me.  Lucky for her, though, she happened to be right.  In light of this unfathomable correctness on her part, I couldn’t even give her an Annoyed Look.  At least not if I wanted to be fair.

People who speak fairly and honestly should be treated fairly and honestly.  If I subscribed to any easily codified philosophy, and I don’t, this would be a major tenet, just below “People who own Nissan Cubes probably shouldn’t be treated fairly or honestly.”

Though I have not, as of yet, been made privy to her feelings about Nissan Cubes, *Casey otherwise deserved fairness, it seemed,

        Dammit.

        Hate it when that happens.

*Casey wasn’t necessarily my first love, though she might have been my first real love.  I honestly don’t know anymore, if I ever knew at all.  I thought so at the time and nothing has changed to make me doubt it.  Still, as I said at the beginning, love can be a strange and fickle beast, and the more I’ve experienced it, the less I’m convinced I know anything about it.  Anything at all.

 Occasionally, in an idle moment, when the mind wanders and eyelids drift shut, the sense that I’ve never actually known much of anything weasels its way into my thoughts, leaving me a bit bemused in its wake.  Because I’m very odd sometimes, I find this sensation pleasant.  I like thinking that the world will always be a strange and uncertain place with all sorts of interesting things to learn.

In retrospect, this suspicion that *Casey was my first real love seems to fit in the topology of my psyche.  It sounds authentic enough.  Or at least sounds like it should be authentic.  When I said I’d been there before, what I mean is that I’m now pretty sure I’d felt stirrings of love – at least as I understood the concept, which wasn’t very well – in relationships before *Casey.   I wasn’t necessarily certain of this back in the day.  I know that I tried to be in love with girls I knew before *Casey.    The obligation to return proffered sentiments like love always lurked about every encounter, buzzing in my ear, telling me that I really should honestly validate the other person’s feelings.  If not for my sake, at least for theirs.

I might even have succeeded in my attempts at reciprocation.  Who knows?   The answers are only as reliable as the one answering.  Given that I can’t even recall the surnames of a few of the girls I dated before her, my memory might not be the most trustworthy indicator.  I’d check my proverbial little black book, but I don’t remember where I left it.   And I’d be worried if I did remember, because I’m pretty damned certain I never actually had one, black or otherwise.

Also, I must emphasize, once again, that one of the great lessons I learned from that Halloween night is that I’m not necessarily the most self-aware person in existence.

Occasionally, apparently, I’m not even the most self-aware person lying on some random stranger’s bed watching some forgettable static of a show on the TV.  Oddly enough, I’ve learned that particular bit of wisdom on more than one occasion.  I’m okay with that, though the tale of the other occasion will have to wait for another day, or perhaps another lifetime.

Any life lesson you manage to escape from alive, right?  Statistically-speaking, though I wouldn’t wager money on it, I must have learned at least a few life lessons over the years.  Damned if I know what they are, but I suppose that doesn’t matter just so long as my subconscious takes them to heart.

        But when I told *Casey I loved her, I meant it.  My impulse to flee like a banshee (do banshees flee?  doesn’t matter, I like the rhyme) only nagged at me a little before I told it to hush and let me enjoy this.

        And enjoy it I did.  What can I say?  She made an intelligent argument for sticking around.  You know, for a blonde.³

This is the nature of things:  the universe slowly pivots and spins on a wobbly fulcrum, with each dip, each return, each shudder as unpredictable as it is inevitable.   As creatures of memory and the moment alike, we never move through life along straight and steady lines.

*Casey wasn’t my last, or greatest love either.  And yet, with one obvious exception, she might be my favorite ex-girlfriend. 

Almost certainly my favorite still living.  Like Forrest Gump, though, that’s all I have to say about that for now.

I’ve learned something about love over the space of many a year and the bosoms of many a lovable woman, a couple of semi-lovable women, and one talented young woman who was a damned good erotic masseuse when she was in the mood: 

Each new love is necessarily a reevaluation of every old love.  

It’s not necessarily deliberate.  There’s no sterile pattern analysis, no lengthy formulaic breakdown of the data.  Instead, it’s predicated on the undeniable truth that life and relationships inevitably tend toward similarities.   Sentimental moments must eventually mirror old sentimentalities.  Each new kiss with each new person echoes other kisses with other people.

We can only say ‘I love you,’ in a few ways, after all.  Language and sentiment both have limits.  The murmurs of affection and promises of the future are repetitions on a very old theme. 

There’s no hypocrisy or lie in this, not really.  We believe because we want to believe, and because the truth changes along with you.  If you’ve ever seriously dated more than one person, you recognize this question of how to rationalize past declarations of true love against current ones.  By nature – and tact, for that matter – we tend to gloss over old loves and old lovers.  They become names, still photos, ghostly memories that fade to outlines as the substance of your relationship recedes into the past.  Usually, we even convince ourselves that the past was nothing more than a prelude, a series of events that had little other purpose than to lead to where we are now.  All love becomes determinism if we try hard enough to believe in fate.  And eventually, though we rarely admit it at the time, our new love will become part of this grand history, another stream joining the river.

This series of rationalizations is completely understandable.  We want each new relationship to be the one that matters, the one that will justify the long and winding path we took to reach that moment when we tell our newest partner that we love her or him.  It may feel like an insult to the ones who came before. 

It isn’t, though.  The present can never change the past.  

When I look back, the inevitable truth is that, no matter how much I loved her at that time and in that place, and how much I still love her as a friend, *Casey was never meant to be either my last or greatest love, if such a declaration means anything coming from someone who doesn’t actually believe in fate. 

Not because I didn’t genuinely love her.  I did, very much.  She assured me of that and I have no reason to believe she was lying to get at my private stash of Halloween candy.  If she was, she certainly committed to the façade far longer than would seem strictly rational.   I mean, once sex and shared appetizers get involved in the equation, you have to ask yourself if you’re really taking the most efficient path to the goal.

And, besides, I would have given her (most of) my candy⁴ had she but asked, and she absolutely would have.  That’s just how she was.  She possessed few – if any – qualms about making her wishes and desires known.

This straightforwardness was always part of her charm. 

Her somewhat unsettling charm, granted, but charm all the same. 

Also, she was really cute when she was being unsettlingly straightforward.

Perhaps the reason I remember her as my first real love so easily is because I never had time to doubt it. 

In college, people tend to be in all kinds of hurry, no matter how hard they try to affect a casual outlook toward life.  Even at their stillest moments, a sense of urgent energy growls restlessly behind the cage doors of their psyches.  Because of this, new friendships and new relationships alike lurk on the threshold of some half-frantic goal, as if they know this new freedom has a shelf-life and they want to pack everything in as quickly as possible.  Or they’re trying to fit in all the things they never got to do freely for the first eighteen years of their lives. 

Either way, the future seems so open, so broad, and yet also seems so imminent that the slightest motion will send them stumbling forward into decisions they aren’t yet ready to make.

On some semi-abstract level, I honestly get that.  And I certainly benefited from that attitude.  More than one late night, after the bars and parties and shared joints and endless philosophical circles in smoke-filled rooms, ended with friends and acquaintances peeling off one by one until there were only two of us left to take this fledgling relationship to a natural conclusion by adjourning to the first convenient bedroom in the general area.

And, on one memorable (if cringeworthy) occasion, adjourning to a balcony overlooking a sidewalk crowded with late-night drinkers after a big football win.  For reasons lost to time, weed and really cheap beer (Old Milwaukee, if I recall correctly, and given the nature of that particular beer, I probably don't, which makes no sense but I'm okay with that), we overestimated the amount of privacy widely-spaced vertical bars no thicker than our thumbs would afford us.  We soon realized our mistake.  Suffice to say, and what I say will have to be sufficient because this is all the detail I’m sharing, I heard far more vocal encouragement of my lovemaking technique than I was used to hearing.  As did she.  Some of it involved language that would scar a sailor.

So I’m not criticizing or judging the inherent restlessness of those years in those places where all the world is young and truth on only the occasional slippery tongue.

        But when you’re experiencing real freedom for the first time, it’s difficult to see the unfolding of life in a proper context.  Your bird’s-eye view lacks sufficient scope because you simply can’t attain a sufficient height, not yet.  Every avenue, street, roundabout, deer trail, and Appian Way all seem like an escape of some sort.  

From what is unclear.  To what is even less clear.  People might say, The mysteries of our mutual recondite past or the dolorous mundanity of human existence or even all the lies and perambulations of our moribund existence.

        They might use less pretentious language, though I doubt it.  Dolorous philosophizing requires the most obfuscating language you can muster without literally speaking in the Pig Latin variant of some long-dead language.  Trust me, I know.  I’ve been there, friend.  I’ve been there.

In any event, all of these can be true; none of them specifically are, not exactly. 

You can slap these rationales (reworded, of course, just for the convenience) on the bumper of that old Freedom VW Bus and carry on without much problem.  That doesn’t mean you’re correct.  Just that the actual reasons aren’t actually important in a practical sense, so you can take whatever comfort you want in whatever philosophy makes you happy.  We know the world grows older by the passing femtosecond.  There’s just nothing to be done for it, no matter how hard some people wish there was.  So reasons fall behind, and, in the end, or well before the end, for that matter, they’re never quite as important as they seemed at the time.

In her way, *Casey embodied this compulsion, this drive toward meaning, more than any girl I ever dated.  Though she knew how to relax and have fun (more the latter than the former), she also couldn’t wait to find out where she was going.  Or at least find out how she was going to get there.  Ambitious, smart, and possessed of more energy in any single one of her body parts than I’ve ever considered having in all my body parts combined, including certain parts pretty damned predisposed toward eager action, she approached college, and life, with a restless verve that I found fascinating in the same way I find intricate poetic imagery fascinating.

(Sometimes I marvel at the fact that she settled down, with three kids, one husband, a live-in au pair, a querulous attitude toward incompetent academics, and probably a favorite sexy dessert recipe that you can make from the contents of the larder of a rural Canadian wendigo habitat.  When I think on it, learning that things worked out so well for her might have been one of the best moments I’ve had over the last three or four years.  I don’t care what the cynics say.  Sometimes there needs to be a happy ending to balance the unhappy ones.) 

I compare it to intricate poetic imagery because it all seemed like it meant something.  I wasn’t sure what, but I was certain it did if for no other reason than the serendipity of our lives intersecting for a little while. 

Most of life means very little, if anything.   People want significance.  They hunger for it, especially when they’re just starting out.  They thirst for some purpose, some reason to be in a hurry.  They tie together threads and build patterns so they can look at what they’ve made and feel like their lives haven’t been wasted.  Most of them never realize that the only real meaning in anything is what you choose it to mean.

So, in retrospect, I definitely believed it all meant something to me.  What it meant to her, if anything, is entirely up to her.  That’s not only the way it has to be, but the way it should be.  We choose our own meanings by ourselves because we have to bear the weight of those meanings by ourselves. 

It meant something in the moment, though, not in retrospect or in comparison to other loves.  It didn’t mean anything eternal, of course.  Eternity is the domain of physicists and metaphysicians.  But it meant something in that time and place and through the lingering season or four we shared.  On that cool October evening when she slipped her hand into mine as we wandered the State Fair, or on those warmer evenings when we walked across the campus with neither destination nor purpose in mind, or on that afternoon at her house when she played her recorder as I laid my ear against her breasts and listened. 

Had she not told me that I loved her, we might never have been together as anything other than friends with a side of tutor/tutee, so it meant that sometimes life hinges on such moments as gay Halloween parties in large rumpled bed.  Life wobbles about, pushed by the tiniest of circumstances and moments you never thought would be memorable.  It meant that I was capable of being surprised, both by myself and by others.

And because each love is both a new love and an old one, and because some partings are inevitable, it meant that we were never meant to last.  For all that we had in common in terms of social mores – that is, neither of us much cared much for the conventional wisdom of social mores – our paths forward were radically different.  I know that.  I knew that even before we broke up, though how honest with myself I was about that truth at the time might be a wee bit less certain.  I certainly never said any such thing to her on the very rational premise that just because the end is inevitable, that doesn’t mean I had to be in any hurry to actually suggest we get it over with or anything.  We got along great while we were together.  Plus – and I cannot emphasize this enough –  I didn’t mind the sexual stuff either. 

Just because we weren’t meant to last, you see, that doesn’t mean we weren’t meant to be, if only for a time.   Nothing in life is ever so simple as mere On/Off.   And who would want it to be? 

There’s no great wisdom to be found here.  You slip into a long season, your arm around an adorable woman you’ve fallen in love with, find a way to make it last just a little bit longer, and, if you play your cards right, you’ll get to see her quite naked, ready and willing.

        Yes, that’s really how I’m going to end this.  I’m pretty sure she would approve.

~Fin~

Footnotes:

1)  Grad School Disease:  symptoms include sweater-vests, square glasses, a preference for loose tobacco over pre-rolled cigarettes even if you don’t smoke, and the use of a ten-syllable word when a one-syllable word would be more appropriate and total silence followed by a hasty exit from the room would be even more appropriate.  Also, cold sores.

2)  Also, I think I fell a little in love with his girlfriend that day.  I wish I could remember her name.  Tracy?  Stephanie?  Susan?  Sarah?  Sarah.  I think it might have been Sarah.  It doesn’t matter, though.  She’ll always be Perfect-Burn-Bitch to me, the snarky One Who Got Away Even If I Wasn’t Actually Pursuing Her.  Plus, while I’m not certain about her name, I do remember what she looked like.  She was, in fact, a small cute blonde, just like *Casey.  Cute and tart – a good combination even if, *Casey and a couple others aside, I’ve generally tended to gravitate more toward brunettes.  And the occasional redhead, because life needs a few redheads in the mix, if only for the battle scars you can proudly display to your eventual grandkids. 

Just kidding – those battle scars will be in places you shouldn’t be revealing to your grandkids if you ever want to be allowed to see them again.   Trust me, though – it’s worth your time and pain.  I speak from experience.
Incidentally, my tendency toward brunettes isn't because I discriminate -- hair color is only a peripheral trait -- but because that's just how it's turned out

3)  Just so we’re clear, I will only give her a link to this once I’ve established that I can outrun her if it becomes necessary.  Or outwit her, which shouldn’t be too hard because she’s, y’know, blonde and all.

4)  Not the Reese's Cups, though.  Those are sacred.   Any preacher, priest, mullah, or guru would back me up.

~Tales from the Deaf Side: Adventures in Shopping~

There will come a time in everyone's life when the crushing weight of a vast and uncaring Lovecraftian cosmos will bear down on you.  Like Job of old, your every move will be stymied, your every hope crushed.  If it hasn't happened to you yet, rest assured – like a particularly vicious game of Duck Duck Goose, it will come to you eventually. 

Don’t dwell on this analogy.  Just accept the truth of inexorable fate steamrolling you and have a scone.  Blueberry.  Maple walnut just isn't nearly as good as people claim.

            Just so we’re clear, the scone won’t help in any way, even if it's blueberry.  It’ll just remind you that you could have bought (boughten) a moist tasty muffin instead of a nasty dry scone.  Then you’ll curse the British for inflicting this fate on you, and cursing the British for their pastries makes for a good distraction from your horrifying future.

            See, everything has a purpose, even scones.  And, if I'm being fair, scones aren't entirely awful.  They're just not in the same universe as the awesomeness that is a well-made muffin.  Pumpkin cream cheese, in case you're wondering what one to buy.

Today, my reasonably but not entirely exorable damnation took the form of a middle-aged man ahead of me in the "12 Items or Less" aisle at the grocery store.  More specifically, the daemonic form of a middle-aged man carting a muckle of groceries – I didn’t count, but the damned cart was full to the brim – without the slightest consideration for those of us who didn’t want to stand in line for another year-and-a-half to purchase a few necessities.  He’d slipped in just ahead of me, practically at a run, barely avoiding clipping me in the process. 

Strangulation seemed singularly too kind a fate for such a vile and cartoonish villain.  I only mention this because I briefly considered strangling him in the name of justice and goodwill toward men.  At some point, I knew deep in my soul, this man would cause hundreds of deaths in an orphanage fire because he cut off a nun trying to buy a fire extinguisher, rendering her bereft and miserable and choosing to take her leave from the store rather than watch this man further destroy all that was good in her life.  

It just felt inevitable, and keep feeling more and more inevitable as I glaringly examined his cart.

He had easily thirty-five plus items.  Maybe forty-five plus. (To help the less-mathematically-inclined amongst you before I continue, both of these numbers definitely exceed twelve in any base 10 numeric system.)  While I didn’t actually count, I felt I was estimating pretty accurately.  None of them were larger than a box of saltines, and with the cart filled to the top, thirty-five was on the deeply conservative side.  Trust me, I was born in the Mississippi Delta, so I’m quite familiar with deeply conservative sides.

Deeply conservative sides are definitely not my cup of tea, so applying the term in relation to this man spoke volumes.

I, incidentally, had eight.  Yes, the number after seven and before nine when counting upwards.  If there’s another ‘eight’ that exceeds ‘twelve’ known to mathematicians that I’m unfamiliar with, rest assured I’m not referring to that eight.

            Using the copious amount of free time I now had because I was stuck behind a depraved monster in line, I actually counted my own items twice as part of my planned defense to the jury were I to go ahead and strangle the man.  Eight was almost low enough that I could convincingly argue that not only was the strangulation justified, it was actually a moral imperative of the sort that any civilized society would have encoded into law before they ever got to the stuff about killing and stealing and selling booze on Sunday. 

Not quite low enough, though.  Seven? probably.  Six? absolutely.  But I wanted every single item in my basket and couldn’t bear to part with even one of them to lower the number to seven, let alone six.  I needed those olives, dammit, for my own unspeakable but highly pleasurable purpose.  If your mind is in the gutter following that last part, get it out.  I'm talking about food porn. 

No.  The other kind of food porn.  Good Lord, what is the matter with you?  Were you even raised right?  Did your parents just shove you into the nearest bawdy house and let you watch the stage shows rather than pay a babysitter to keep a disinterested eye on you?

            Not that any of this mattered.  Eight items is already less than – or, rather, fewer than – twelve items.  Having counted twice, I went ahead and did the math twice, just in case my biases were showing through. Eight items remained fewer than twelve items, even when I accounted for the four separate bananas that constituted the collective bunch I’d picked out.  That came out to eleven, which cannot be construed in any fashion as being greater than twelve in this modern age of smartphones which can calculate such things for us to prevent any egregious addition errors.

            So, heady with the rush of doing some math, I decided to do even more math.  As the man removed items from his basket, he examined each one at length, as if puzzled at how this particular box of laxatives fit into his personal worldview and how he saw his future unfolding once he'd implemented his laxative plan.  I was tempted to explain the connection there, using my cursory understanding of scatology and exactly where his head currently resided.  But, to be honest, it's a field that never interested me in the slightest.  Instead, I calculated how long this process of unloading grocery items would take.  My best estimate, based on his speed and his apparent unwillingness to make the effort to move fast enough for his motion to be easily discernable to the naked human eye:  one year, three weeks, two days, eleven hours, and an indeterminate number of minutes.  Then, thinking of an old stand-up comic joke about marriage and murder, I calculated the average length of a murder two sentence.  

            Relying on very scanty knowledge of the criminal justice system, I arrived at a figure of seventeen years, four months.  Then I subtracted ten years for the sense of satisfaction I would gain from strangling the man. 

Sadly, even after that deduction, violence seemed to lead to the least desirable of the possible outcomes in a world with values so screwed up that it doesn't even have the death penalty for people who can't be bothered to return their shopping carts to the closest cart corral even when the stores take great care to scatter multiple accessible corrals in the parking lot so nobody has to walk for more than 60 seconds to return their cart and then return to their vehicles, get in, apply some make-up or...whatever it is we males apply, possibly also make-up...start the vehicle and recited Larkin's "This Be the Verse" for whatever reason.

Whew.  Yes, I am aware the preceding paragraph was just one long rambling sentence.  No, I don't think I need a lobotomy, but thanks for asking.  Not nearly enough people make the effort of suggesting solutions to perceived problems.

The reason I chose this aisle was pretty straightforward.  The cashier knew me from many previous trips to this store. She knew about my hearing loss and that trying to hold a conversation with me would require more time and effort available to either of us at 5:30 in the afternoon during the pre-dinner rush. 

Not a big deal, really, at the time.  Her lane was open.  I had an appropriate number of items, and I figured it would simplify my egress so I could go home, put the stuff away, and head to the coffee shop.  So I just took five steps (also fewer than twelve, for those of you who care enough to keep track of my math-related discoveries) forward to enter her lane and get on with my life. 

            So, quite understandably, I found the Completely Lacking in Math and Basic Human Decency Skills Guy’s behavior even more aggravating than it otherwise would have been.

Nevertheless, I came to the inevitable conclusion that there was nothing to be done for it unless I wanted to go through the bother of a lengthy trial for murder two, and lengthy trials rarely end up like you dreamed they would when you were a starry-eyed child hoping to be acquitted of a very scandalous (but entirely-justified) strangulation event.  I glanced around at the other aisles.  For such a busy time, remarkably few aisles had been opened.  Exactly three, in fact, including the one I currently stood in.  One looked a bit too lethargic for my tastes.  Translation: mostly older sorts, people who were likely quite nice but also likely to insist on balancing their checkbook and possibly exploring the virtues of reverse mortgages while paying for their groceries.  So I took the other one, which seemed reasonably populated by people who’d share my love of getting the hell out of the grocery store with all due haste so long as a basic level of safety was maintained.  Such lovely-looking people, and I’m not just saying that because of the appearance of impatience to get this over with.

Actually, I am just saying it for that reason.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Situational beauty is still beauty, right?

I took my place at the end of the line.  While I cannot now recall exactly how many people were in line – I didn’t know at the time that I’d need to recollect all the details of my little adventure there – I reached the cashier in a little over ten minutes.  My items placed safely on the belt, my basket placed on the other side of the bagging area, my soul stuffed back down in a place where it could be free of thoughts of strangulation, I pulled out my wallet and a credit card and proceeded to look expectantly at the cashier. 

The cashier seemed to be new, or at least I’d never seen him before.  A nice enough looking fellow who took care of my groceries with the proper speed and accuracy.  I stood poised to insert the previously-mentioned credit card into the card reader as the cashier scanned the last of my groceries (the aforementioned bananas, if anyone is insanely curious) and pressed some appropriate part of the screen to indicate the scanner was currently evaluating bananas. 

I gave him a small, friendly smile as he caught my eye, and started to look down at the card in my hand.

I say ‘started,’ because meeting his gaze had been a huge mistake.  He apparently took that as an invitation to ask me something.

I say ‘something’ because his attempts to ask me a question had been a huge mistake.  He apparently really, really wanted an answer because he simply refused to finish the calculation of the final total until I offered him a satisfactory reply.

I say ‘refused’ because he absolutely would not let go of his question. 

This is how it went down:

“I’m sorry, I have severe hearing loss.  I can’t understand you.” 

A quite reasonable interjection into the flow of this nascent conversation, I felt, given the circumstances.  My pride at constructing those two sentences on the fly might have been unreasonable, but they were nevertheless appropriate.  Direct, to the point, grammatically sound, and completely free of unnecessary metaphors.

This did not in any way satisfy him.  Not even in the slightest. I've seen less-satisfied expressions in my time, of course, but most of them took place in my bed with someone I actually wanted to satisfy.

Outside of his facial expression, various subtle clues led me to the conclusion that he was well and truly unsatisfied by my attempts to explain the situation.  The most obvious one was the fact that he proceeded to immediately repeat himself.  Luckily, I am in possession of a prodigious intellect, so the significance of this clue did not escape me.  He clearly wasn’t going to accept such a facile and pointless contribution from me in the context of the conversation and just as clearly demanded that I stop screwing around and just answer the damned question.

            One deep breath later, I took a quick inventory of the possible things he might be asking. 

My grocery items were all firmly bagged in plastic.  I didn’t even see any paper bags as an alternative, and rebagging my groceries at this late point in the game seemed ridiculous anyway. 

Unless Earl Grey teabags I bought had been declared a controlled substance at some point in the week since I last purchased a box of them, none of these grocery items required a picture ID. 

The card reader took care of asking if I wanted to do debit or credit.  Just so you won’t be surprised by my choice when I describe it later, I would have chosen debit.  You know, had he been kind enough to just finish totaling the price and giving me the option to stick my card into the slot.

I had not given him any reason to ask me on a date, so, disappointingly, that wasn’t likely to be the question.  Granted, I would have turned him down on account of not being gay, but it would have been nice to be asked. 

He hadn’t shoved a copy of the Book of Mormon in my face, so it seemed unlikely he was trying to recruit me to take a covered wagon to Utah. 

Very unlikely, I calculated.  But still possible. 

            It would be a cold day in hell before I got into a Mormon covered wagon without so much as a glimpse of all the sister-wives that would be made available to me.  A cold damned day indeed. 

So there was only one thing left to say in the matter of Random vs the possibly-gay-possibly Mormon-possibly-both cashier:

“I’m sorry, I have severe hearing loss.  I can’t understand you.”

He looked visibly annoyed.  I kept my expression blank, with just a touch of contriteness.

Somehow that gave him all the prodding he needed to ask the question again.  I knew it was the same question because, while I couldn’t quite understand him, the movement of his lips and the vague sounds I could hear were exactly the same as the first two times.

I goggled at him.  He just opened his eyes as wide as he could and waited for my reply.

The standoff seemed to be reaching epic proportions.  Not since Gilgamesh challenged Humbaba the forest spirit had such a resolute (perhaps even foolhardy) conflict of wills taken place.  On one side, a cashier who wanted me to answer what seemed to be a very short and basic question.  On the other side, me and my intense desire to just see this conversation ended so I could get my groceries – which included chilled perishables and dairy products – back home and safely inside whatever repository seemed most appropriate.  Which, I emphasize again, included chilled perishables and dairy products, all of which would be best suited to being placed back inside a contraption of some sort that one could use to keep them chilled.  As luck would have it, I possessed such a contraption.  A refrigerator, some might call it, mainly because that’s exactly what it was.  My life has been so much easier since the invention of this marvelous method of chilling items, but there was a catch – I had to get said items to the refrigerator in order for it to do its intended job.

Unfortunately, for all the modern conveniences of this new world of ours, science has yet to develop a reliable system for transferring items into such a contraption from the site of an impasse in a grocery store checkout line a mile away.

            Or had it?  I briefly catalogued all the various and magical things my phone could accomplish that a phone circa, say, 1950 could not.  Perhaps there existed an app, a program, a magical computer fairy specializing in quantum entanglement and teleportation methods that could solve this pressing issue for me.

            Okay, no.  That was a deeply stupid hope. 

But in the absence of any possible escape to latch onto with all the desperate vim I could muster, deeply stupid hopes were my last resort.

            It must be said, and probably has been said, that the number of times I reach the ‘last resort stupid thoughts’ stage in my daily life is quite excessive, if not downright soul-destroying.

            Since the distance problem seemed irresolvable at this stage, and the stupid thoughts problem was simply an ongoing condition that had plagued me since my first words (Huh? and Derp, if I recall correctly) and would likely follow me into whatever afterlife I managed to earn, all I could do was repeat myself for the third time.

            “I’m sorry, I have severe hearing loss.  I can’t understand you.”

            And he repeated himself for the fourth time.  

            I carefully kept my face neutral as I sighed to myself.  On the Day of Wrath, that Dies Irae where the quick and the dead are judged, they say we will face an accounting and recounting of all the moments of our lives. 

If that happens, I have absolutely no doubt that recounting this conversation will put God Herself to sleep on the throne.  Or irritate Her enough to banish both me and my erstwhile cashier to the Purgatory until we find a way to reach an some sort of peace with each other through yelling, screaming, heavy-duty roleplaying, and a melodramatic re-enactment of our battle of wills at the register.

Eschatological thoughts aside, the current situation remained unresolved.  So I tried one more time.

“I’m sorr…” and I momentarily wondered what the hell I was sorry for.

            On a basic level, I know perfectly well why I found myself compulsively apologizing.  It’s been bred into me like kicks into a donkey.  Can’t escape nurture entirely.  Also, I’m naturally polite, and you can’t escape nature entirely.  And then there’s the fact that I’m philosophically polite.  Can’t escape…um, something something entirely.  I’m polite not because I have to be, or because everyone deserves to be treated politely, but because I feel it helps make the world a better place.  Sometimes you just have to cater to the really unpalatable types in order to make the day better for those who deserve to have a better day.

            Incidentally, despite the fact that I began to engage in lengthy wondering, I completed the reply above:

“…y, I have severe hearing loss.  I can’t understand you.”

            Suddenly, after all the headache and heartache, after the long and weary road, after my very own pilgrim’s progress past Vanity Fair and through the Slough of Despond all the way to the Cupola of Disability, after many a lonesome mile, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me…finally, finally he gave up.  The undisguised look of annoyance on his face didn’t bother me at all, any more than a torturer poking me with a small dull needle while bending me on the rack would have. 

Bigger issues, you see.  Bigger issues.

            Had I been in possession of illegal fireworks and/or illegal drugs, I would have celebrated the moment in a fashion that the people in line behind me would not soon forget.  Sadly – or, more precisely, luckily – I had neither of these about my person at that exact moment.  So I celebrated by finally inserting my card.

            What little dignity he’d left me almost went away.  Luckily, at the last second, I realized I was putting the wrong end in and rotated the card around to the chipped side.

Almost to the finish line.  Almost, almost, almost. 

            I may have mentally chanted that word a few times.  I won’t confirm I also mentally chanted a few less socially-acceptable words.  You’ll just have to assume I did.  Since you have no proof, I am denying any such thing ever happened and that’s that.

I pressed the appropriate buttons to confirm I wanted to charge it as a debit card.  Then I requested $40 cash back, entered my PIN (why it didn’t ask for my PIN before asking if I wanted cash back, I have no idea), paused for the briefest second to ensure I’d entered the right PIN for that card, and finally ascertained I had, in fact, entered the proper sequence of numbers before pressing Enter.  The metaphorical finish line glowing before me like a band of angels, I looked up expectantly.  All told, the process took approximately 20 seconds from inserting the card to pressing the last number in my PIN.  I could almost smell the sweet, sweet opium poppies of freedom on the breeze.  I waited as the cashier finished up the cashierly stuff necessary to complete the transaction and the register drawer opened.  He reached toward those stacks of cash.  Almost…almost…and he stopped and looked at me.

            My internal wail of despair turned into an internal high-pitched screech of incipient madness.

            Just let my people go, my eyes begged.  Let us follow our bliss, embrace our destiny, dance in a particularly upsetting rain, chase our fluffy clouds of ambition.

            If he had even the slightest talent for translating the prolix motion of eyes into English words, he demonstrated none of it.  His mouth opened and…yep, you guessed, he said something.  Clearly not the same thing he'd been saying before, but somehow that provided me with little comfort.

            Seeing as he’d already demonstrated a complete inability to understand the various nuances of my glares, my eyes replied, Go to hell on the B-train express to the deepest pit.

            My mouth, on the other hand, said, “I…okay, same problem as before.  I’m sorry.  I can’t understand what you're saying.”  I took care to emphasize the ‘can’t’ on the off-chance that he thought I was refusing to understand him out of pure irrational dislike for him or his voice.  I added a slight emphasis to the "saying" in case he had any uncertainties about what aspect of his attempts at communication was causing this incredibly uncomfortable problem.

            So what did he do?  Yep, you guessed it.  He apologized profusely, pulled out his phone, exchanged numbers with me, and engaged in a lengthy text discussion of our current predicament, culminating in a point by point explanation of his side of our entire interaction.  Then he clocked out and we went out for coffee and beer together.

            (Yes, I am being sarcastic.  Why are we stating the obvious today?  Are we playing a game of some sort?)

            He.  Repeated.  Himself.  Of course he did.  This encounter could have ended no other way.  I realize that now.  The universe works according to a plan, and it was sure as hell not going to deviate from that plan just to save me an enormous amount of aggravation. 

Then, in one shining moment, I guessed what he said and gave the universe a mental finger.  He was asking what denominations I wanted.  Most cashiers don’t bother asking, so I can be forgiven for not realizing this immediately. 

So I said, “Doesn’t matter.  I’ll take whatever collection of bills you can assemble so long as they add up to $40.  Please.”  I didn’t even add the ‘Please’ belatedly.

            Even as I realized how snarky that sounded, I tried to keep my voice light and friendly. 

I tried to feel bad about letting a bit of my serious aggravation with him slip into my reply.  Instead, I told myself that he could have just given me two $20s on the very reasonable assumption that had I a particular preference, I would have told him so already, for the love of all that is holy.

            I took the cash (two $20s, as it turned out), grabbed my bag, muttered a very quick “Thanks” and left the store with as much speed as I could muster without indulging in crazy power-walking movements.

            For everyone wondering, and I know you are, I got my groceries home and put away.  Then I got a well-earned cup of coffee and started writing this.

When they make the inevitable blockbuster Hollywood musical version of this, and you can rest assured they will, I want to be played by a tousled but lovable civet cat with good motor skills and mediocre fashion sense.  Or Daniel Day-Lewis.  Either will be acceptable.  And because all great heroic epics need one, my love interest (who, and I cannot emphasize this enough, must not be the cashier) needs to be a lovely human brunette female with kind eyes, a graceful walk, and a good sense of humor.  Also, an obvious predilection for civets and/or Daniel Day-Lewis would not be amiss.

            You know what?  Let’s stick with the civet.  Daniel Day-Lewis would probably shiv his eardrums out of a misguided obsession with method acting.

~Fin~


Postscript:  I should clarify that I hold no animosity toward the cashier.  Whatever his life experiences had been up until that point, they probably hadn't adequately prepared him for that situation.  It happens.


Mr. Completely Lacking in Math and Basic Human Decency Skills Guy, on the other hand, needs to have some basic math and human decency skills smacked into him.  That's just not acceptable behavior in civilized society.