Romance is Mush

So this blog has thus far been stringently impersonal -- observations, thoughts, musings, but nothing of the author's own feelings or relationships.

But now, whether out of the overpowering gush of -- yeck -- feelings, or out of the exhaustion of other material, I will divulge that the author's great romance and engagement has come to naught.

From a certain perspective, one can ask why one would ever get into relationships in the first place unless they were strictly unavoidable, unless someone were to hold a gun to your head, threatening to squeeze the trigger if you didn't steal that first tingle-to-your-toes kiss, if that first I-love-you-darling hadn't sort of flopped out of you.

I'll admit that even more than losing myself in the rosy haze of a new romance, I really I am very much enthralled with the drama, the wry, urbane, bourbon-sipping, sheer worldliness of losing love -- more even than having had it in the first place. It's a new toy for a former monk reentering the world. An artfully tarnished medallion of Being In Society, the thing that for Cole Porter and Billy Strayhorn and the rest of those brilliant, arch (and, not that it enters into it, gay) swells defined American sophistication for generations, even if in the end it really ended up being about emphysema and corroded livers.

Romance is mush,
Stifling those who strive.
I’ll live a lush life in some small dive...
And there I’ll be, while I rot
With the rest of those whose lives are lonely,
too..

But again, such undeniable pleasure in identifying and tasting these things I'd heard about, these icons of Worldly Living -- falling in love! getting engaged! oh, boy, getting dumped! -- trumped whatever minor emotional discomfort might actually have been felt at the moment. Every part of the relationship, almost especially the end, has been like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time.

Well, I'm going to toddle off to bed in my smoking jacket, the ice in my bourbon clinking softly in the glass. I pause at the bedroom window, looking out over the twinkling lights around Central Park, and pour myself more bourbon...I find myself humming the great Jerome Kern song...

They, asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
I of course replied, something here inside,
Can not be denied.

They, said some day you'll find,
All who love are blind,
When you heart's on fire, you must realize,
Smoke gets in your eyes.

So I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed,
To think they would doubt our love,
And yet today, my love has gone away,
I am without my love.

Now laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, when a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes,

Smoke gets in your eyes.

Ah. Just so. (Takes a long pull from the bourbon. Then a drag from his cigarette, and another pull, this time directly from the bottle.)

Blood Lust and Aging Boys

So we have our boys' school 30th class reunion coming up. A friend has for some reason volunteered to organize it and wants me to give him ideas for activities. Well.

If this doesn't descend into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario, I told him, I'm frankly not interested. I can't abide the thought of us as contented, fat, balding adults standing around in Dockers, sipping pinot grigio. What, after all, does that have to do with nine years of regimentation and David Copperfield-like toil under the lash of a system that hoped to mold us into "leaders"? Yes, 90% of all my knowledge may have have come from that institution, but so did 98% of my deep-rooted stresses. So I'm lobbying for a one-hour game of Blood Lust.

Blood Lust: 80 kids, one ball, no rules. We developed it in 7th Grade as a way to, well...you get the picture. Now, 30 years on, I figure this is our final opportunity to return to the feral underbelly or our childhood, the last chance to go down under a frenzied and unsupervised scrum of screeching males, crushed to the asphalt but never, never, never letting go of the dodge ball.

Alternatively, we could play Kill The Goalie. Kill The Goalie differs from Blood Lust only in that it involves four goalies, 80 center forwards, unlimited soccer balls, and a cement wall.

Basically, if the evening doesn't end with a draped body being rolled into a paramedic van, it will have been a failure.

I'm hoping it's an opportunity to let me start to come to terms with some of my issues.

Pre-Decompression

Saturday I attended a pre-Decompression event at the Sublounge.

I'd expected The Sublounge to be a lavish technoplayground,
plush with subdued lighting, bubbling blue drinks and
flickering pop images everywhere. Instead it was a ratty,
unstylishly undecorated hole that two weeks ago probably
served rockgut to longshoremen and Hell's Angels. It
boasted two floors, but that's only because they let people
into the basement, where you expected to see rusty snow
shovels propped up against the wall. The whole thing was a
bit like, hey, kids, let's put on a party! Which made it
work, in a funny way, I guess its lack of, or utter failure
of pretention.

More than a few people had that fresh-off-the-playa look, with
luminescent clothing and goggles and golden horns. A man (I
think) in a large, furry, cat/bear/amoeba suit was giving a
massage to a braless girl in a transparent blouse. A guy
dressed as Jesus, crown of thorns and everything, stopped
dancing to come over and tell my friend Ananda that he'd
just come out of the closet.

My nod to the theme of the evening was a big Santa cap. I
figured, Christmas at Hallowe'en, that's like, whoo,
semiotic dissonance, I'm an artist.

We danced up a storm for a half-hour or so. Left for
Oakland (Ananda lives there and I was housesitting for
sister that night) only to find a massive traffic jam
leaving the city. Took almost two hours to get on the
bridge. I'm all for earthquake retrofitting, but maybe
they could rethink doing it on Saturday night????

What would we do without italics? I'd actually have to
write something shocking -- instead of just implying it!!

Do you know what I'm saying here????