I just took my first look at #21 in awhile, where I reference not being to listen to the Garbage song #1 Crush without thinking of my friend Owen. As I was reading it, I was listening to the little radio station on Fred Flare, where I'd been looking for an alarm clock. As I'm reading #21, #1 Crush came on the radio. It's 1 of maybe 60 songs on the whole thing. So, thank you God 2.0, or thank you coincidence. Either one works.
I'm getting down with my kumbaya roots (raised by wolves dressed like hippies, that's the short version) and asking for world peace today, which is a little like asking for the fabric of the whole world to be ripped to shreds and rewoven with a tighter and softer hand to it, maybe out of the undyed wool of very cheerful sheep. But I want war to end, I want everyone to go to bed with a full belly, I want torture and rape as a war weapon to stop, I want people to stop getting killed over land or God or ideas. It's what I want, and it's not well thought out or remotely logical, but I'm pretty okay with the fact that I'm basically hurtling emotions with curly hair. I have to be okay with that; I have to wake up with me every day, and I'm done changing.
I'm always asking for the little things, hoping they'll add up to the big things. Now here's a big thing. I hope it helps all the little things.
Love --
Showing posts with label goddamned gun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label goddamned gun. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The (Overwrought, Overdiscussed) Butterfly Effect
Since we're nearing the end of the year I thought I'd go back over these posts and see how things have transpired since I picked up the megaphone of this blog and started shouting into the dark heavens.
I took another look at post#1, Universe Please Help Me Find A Name for This Blog (with apologies to RG who made it very clear he never again wants to read about just what Judy Blume helped me find. I owe him a nice, calming post about baseball.)
What struck me most is that I had totally forgotten the incident in the bar that had led me to start blogging in the first place. Some strangers told me a couple of small stories and nudged me in another direction, one I wanted to go in but just didn't have the map to. And if it hadn't been recorded here, I'd have forgotten all about it.
A good friend of mine recently went through a bad breakup. She said a story I'd told her ten years ago about my breakup with my first love helped her, as did other stories she'd heard about breakups. This was her first real breakup with a longtime love. She said having no experience at this, all these stories prepared her, and she leaned on them, thinking about how her friends had felt and how they'd gotten though it, and it helped her follow a path that others had already walked.
I guess what I'm learning is that life is not a series of big dramatic moments. It's a constant weaving of thousands of threads. You're weaving other people's lives without even knowing it.
The love I have for Owen, my friend who died years ago, still reverberates even though he's not here to tease me about it. After a very bad recent day, when I only saw my badness and all the reasons why the couple of people I know are angry with me right now absolutely should be, and I said "I don't think I can handle this pain anymore," well, there he was. I came home from my evening class and sitting in the lobby of my building were a few true-crime novels. (One of the things I've come to love about my building is the neighbors leave books and magazines for eachother). At the top was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Owen's favorite contemporary book and one I've never read. I'm reading it. And all the things I loved about him -- his humor, his warmth, his sense of the absurd and of the good -- are still right here in the world and even in this book with its strange blend of lurid and lovable. And of course I can take any pain there is to be doled out.
I took another look at post#1, Universe Please Help Me Find A Name for This Blog (with apologies to RG who made it very clear he never again wants to read about just what Judy Blume helped me find. I owe him a nice, calming post about baseball.)
What struck me most is that I had totally forgotten the incident in the bar that had led me to start blogging in the first place. Some strangers told me a couple of small stories and nudged me in another direction, one I wanted to go in but just didn't have the map to. And if it hadn't been recorded here, I'd have forgotten all about it.
A good friend of mine recently went through a bad breakup. She said a story I'd told her ten years ago about my breakup with my first love helped her, as did other stories she'd heard about breakups. This was her first real breakup with a longtime love. She said having no experience at this, all these stories prepared her, and she leaned on them, thinking about how her friends had felt and how they'd gotten though it, and it helped her follow a path that others had already walked.
I guess what I'm learning is that life is not a series of big dramatic moments. It's a constant weaving of thousands of threads. You're weaving other people's lives without even knowing it.
The love I have for Owen, my friend who died years ago, still reverberates even though he's not here to tease me about it. After a very bad recent day, when I only saw my badness and all the reasons why the couple of people I know are angry with me right now absolutely should be, and I said "I don't think I can handle this pain anymore," well, there he was. I came home from my evening class and sitting in the lobby of my building were a few true-crime novels. (One of the things I've come to love about my building is the neighbors leave books and magazines for eachother). At the top was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Owen's favorite contemporary book and one I've never read. I'm reading it. And all the things I loved about him -- his humor, his warmth, his sense of the absurd and of the good -- are still right here in the world and even in this book with its strange blend of lurid and lovable. And of course I can take any pain there is to be doled out.
Friday, September 7, 2007
#21
A late night wish to move on
There are times I wish I’d never met you.
Never taken your roommate’s offer to lend me money for the bus home and never gone to your room to tell him never mind but thank you, I’d gotten a ride with someone from off campus.
Never seen you with the grin that burst out of your face as you sat on your own bed in your own room at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, alone, with your shirt buttoned up to your chin and covered in so many clothes that I remember you, probably incorrectly, dressed in an overcoat and boots. Never been amused by you sitting there grinning as you listened to music you loved that I loved too and never invited you to the party at my house, impulsively, because you seemed so full of life.
I wish I’d never become your friend, and never held on to that friendship after I left that haunted, unhinged valley -- and the school squatting at the bottom of it -- behind. I wish I’d never heard about how impassioned you were about saving the soul of that rotting school and how beautifully you spoke about the education it had given you, pushing through the scrim of your dyslexia and delivering literature, turning on the light you didn’t know was there and making manuscripts start to push out of your skull, unformed glimmering arms and legs of potential future Athenas.
They fired your teachers anyway, and they shouldn’t have, they should have listened to you when they had the chance.
I wish I could hear “Not So Manic Now,” “All My Ghosts” and “#1 Crush” without thinking of you. I wish my friends who became your friends never went through their own muted or jagged versions of the same pain I did. I wish I’d never, with my husband, spent hours and hours agonizing over how to fit your name inside the vowels and consonants that would represent our newborn child without bursting into tears every time I called him in for dinner.
I wish I could hear news reports of strangers getting shot and just think “Oh, how terrible,” and not “Left temporal lobe,” which is where the bullet entered your brain and took your grin, your sardonic near-evil wit, your embrace, your singing voice, your constant irritations and your deep desire to fix everyone you loved, your freckles and every other piece of you that I loved so dear, away in an instant.
I wish I’d never felt your hand on the shoulder of my fear the night it appeared that I’d miscarried. I wish you never guided me in my dreams. I wish you hadn’t told me I’d marry my husband without ever having met him when we didn’t really know it yet ourselves. I wish I’d never seen magic or joy or love.
I wish I’d never vacationed with you, cleared the dishes with you, sat shoulder to shoulder with you dreaming about the future and laughing about how the hell we would ever get over our pasts. I wish I didn’t see actors from the t.v. shows you worked on and only want to hear your stories about them and your adventures.
I wish I’d never told you, the last time we spoke, that all I wanted was you to find a partner to spend your life with only to have you reply “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen for me.” I wish 3 weeks later, you hadn’t been proven right.
The only thing I do wish, sometimes, late at night, is that I’d called you back that week, or gone to visit you in L.A. like we were discussing, or somehow moved the earth and the heavens and the angle of that goddamned gun. I wish I’d changed time, set the clock off balance, set the world on fire. Maybe you would have walked into that parking lot five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, or not at all.
I wish I’d stopped what killed you.
I wish you were here.
I wish this would stop hurting. It’s been seven years.
There are times I wish I’d never met you.
Never taken your roommate’s offer to lend me money for the bus home and never gone to your room to tell him never mind but thank you, I’d gotten a ride with someone from off campus.
Never seen you with the grin that burst out of your face as you sat on your own bed in your own room at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, alone, with your shirt buttoned up to your chin and covered in so many clothes that I remember you, probably incorrectly, dressed in an overcoat and boots. Never been amused by you sitting there grinning as you listened to music you loved that I loved too and never invited you to the party at my house, impulsively, because you seemed so full of life.
I wish I’d never become your friend, and never held on to that friendship after I left that haunted, unhinged valley -- and the school squatting at the bottom of it -- behind. I wish I’d never heard about how impassioned you were about saving the soul of that rotting school and how beautifully you spoke about the education it had given you, pushing through the scrim of your dyslexia and delivering literature, turning on the light you didn’t know was there and making manuscripts start to push out of your skull, unformed glimmering arms and legs of potential future Athenas.
They fired your teachers anyway, and they shouldn’t have, they should have listened to you when they had the chance.
I wish I could hear “Not So Manic Now,” “All My Ghosts” and “#1 Crush” without thinking of you. I wish my friends who became your friends never went through their own muted or jagged versions of the same pain I did. I wish I’d never, with my husband, spent hours and hours agonizing over how to fit your name inside the vowels and consonants that would represent our newborn child without bursting into tears every time I called him in for dinner.
I wish I could hear news reports of strangers getting shot and just think “Oh, how terrible,” and not “Left temporal lobe,” which is where the bullet entered your brain and took your grin, your sardonic near-evil wit, your embrace, your singing voice, your constant irritations and your deep desire to fix everyone you loved, your freckles and every other piece of you that I loved so dear, away in an instant.
I wish I’d never felt your hand on the shoulder of my fear the night it appeared that I’d miscarried. I wish you never guided me in my dreams. I wish you hadn’t told me I’d marry my husband without ever having met him when we didn’t really know it yet ourselves. I wish I’d never seen magic or joy or love.
I wish I’d never vacationed with you, cleared the dishes with you, sat shoulder to shoulder with you dreaming about the future and laughing about how the hell we would ever get over our pasts. I wish I didn’t see actors from the t.v. shows you worked on and only want to hear your stories about them and your adventures.
I wish I’d never told you, the last time we spoke, that all I wanted was you to find a partner to spend your life with only to have you reply “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen for me.” I wish 3 weeks later, you hadn’t been proven right.
The only thing I do wish, sometimes, late at night, is that I’d called you back that week, or gone to visit you in L.A. like we were discussing, or somehow moved the earth and the heavens and the angle of that goddamned gun. I wish I’d changed time, set the clock off balance, set the world on fire. Maybe you would have walked into that parking lot five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, or not at all.
I wish I’d stopped what killed you.
I wish you were here.
I wish this would stop hurting. It’s been seven years.
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